Staph infections and immune system
by admin ~ January 29th, 2010.
The gene profiles of young children with severe Staphylococcus aureus infections have been mapped as per a study by Infectious disease specialists at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
The finding is expected to offer a new dimension as to how the immune system gets programmed for responding to the pathogen.
Dr. Monica Ardura, instructor of pediatrics at UT Southwestern and lead author of the study available online in PLoS One, the Public Library of Science’s online journal, remarked that the initial description was very consistent, very reproducible and very intense.
From News-Medical.net:
Researchers used blood samples collected between 2001 and 2005 from 77 children - 53 hospitalized at Children’s Medical Center Dallas with invasive S aureus infections and 24 controls. The control samples were collected from healthy children attending either well-child clinic or undergoing elective surgical procedures. Children with underlying chronic diseases, immunodeficiency, multiple infections, and those who received steroids or other immunomodulatory therapies were excluded from the study.
The children ranged in age from a few months to 15 years and included 43 boys and 34 girls. Those with S aureus infections - both methicillin-resistant (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible (MSSA) - were matched with healthy controls for age, sex and race. The researchers also characterized the extent as well as the type of infection in each patient to make sure that the strain of bacteria didn’t influence the results.
Dr. Ardura stressed that more research is needed because the results represent a one-time snapshot of what’s going on in the cell during an invasive staphylococcal infection.
The study researchers noted that the study highlights the fact as to how the immune system makes a response to an S aureus infection at the genetic level. This finding was supported by the fact that gene expression profiling can be termed as a process suggesting how genes of an individual get activated or suppressed in response to the infection.
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